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About the Author
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, TLS, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Reason Magazine, and many other national periodicals. Topics he will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
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Why Freshmen Aren't Ready for College | Comment [16]
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Featured Articles By the Author
The Value of Roget
One of the keener disappointments for writing teachers is the impoverished vocabulary that even the best students bring to their work. Diction, for them, isn’t worth the labor. They don’t recognize the arts of eloquence, oratory, forensics, and conversation, and if they did, and practiced them out of class, they might lose their friends.
“Try an experiment,” I sometimes urge students. “The next time you’re in the cafeteria with four friends and the colloquy turns to Obama, mutter this: ‘Such mellifluous sonorities the man produces.’ See how they react.”
The outcome shows that little in the leisure time of adolescents contributes to a better verbal arsenal. In the early ages, the vast majority of vocabulary building takes place in informal settings, not in classrooms. By college years, though, the settings surrounding most freshmen damage their diction more than enhance it, and course readings and class discussions often mark their only exposure to finer expressions. Their writing assignments are often the only chance to implement them.
It is strange, then, that so many teachers and writers discourage young people from picking up a thesaurus when they write. Countless times when I have pressed students to find a better word, a Latinate one, they have scrunched up their eyes in uncertainty, and when I have pushed a thesaurus at them they’ve replied, “But my former teacher told me not to use it.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because I might get it wrong.”
Simon Winchester, journalist and author of The Professor and the Madman, made the point forcefully in The Atlantic in 2001. In “Word Imperfect,” he wrote, “Roget’s Thesaurus no longer merits the unvarnished adoration it has over the years almost invariably received. It should be roundly condemned as a crucial part of the engine work that has transported us to our current state of linguistic and intellectual mediocrity.” Roget’s prime error was to omit definitions in lists of synonyms. Without definitions to accompany each word, Winchester argued, Roget, “wrongheadedly and irresponsibly…produced no more than an unexplained and inexplicable list of quick fixes.” As a result, “the word chosen with each presto! is often wrong. Sometimes very wrong. Often slightly wrong. And at the very least, frequently, curiously, and discordantly off. For example, a freshman student of mine, who admitted to using Roget, attempted to improve the phrase ‘his earthly fingers’ by changing it to ‘his chthonic digits.‘”
For Winchester, that epithet was a disaster. For me, though, it’s a chance for the student-writer to learn. Of course students make mistakes. That’s how language use improves in adult life — trial and error. No trial means no error, and no growth. Winchester and other anti-thesaurus teachers concentrate writing instruction on the final product in class assignments. They should regard writing instruction in developmental terms, and see errors in usage as healthy vocabulary struggles. That’s why I often require students to compose two versions of one paper, one in low diction and slang, the other in multi-syllabic, Latinate, thesaurus words. And to use their thesaurus avidly. (See here for a recent bio on Roget.)
In Winchester’s example, the important thing isn’t that the student came up with an absurd term. The important thing is, in fact, missing: how Winchester turned that absurdity into verbal knowledge.
Posted at 07:18:54 PM on March 24, 2008 | All postings by Mark BauerleinComments
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Okay, just for fun (since I really believe that such objections to the use of a thesaurus have to be paper- based), I put the word “mellifluous” into an online dictionary with a multilingual thesaurus.
Here’s the result (and remember, you can click on ANY word in ANY language ANYWHERE on the page and get a pop-up screen with a definition):
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/mellifluous
Now, the various online “Roget’s” at bartleby apparently do not have this feature:
http://www.bartleby.com/cgi-bin/texis/webinator/sitesearch?query=mellifluous&db=db&filter=colThesaurus
Indeed, in the age of the Internet, it’s not the value of “Roget” but the value of the hyper-linked thesaurus that truly rises to the occasion, as it were, of writing in the 21st century….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Mar 24, 08:12 PM · #
P.S. This one takes its definition from the American Heritage Dictionary, is laid out a bit differently, and hyper-linked differently:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/mellifluous
Etc., etc., and so forth….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Mar 24, 08:40 PM · #
The problem isn’t the USE of the Thesaurus…it’s the lack of regular use of a dictionary….
Usually my students refuse to look up unknown words and only resort to the thesaurus when [lamely] trying to paraphrase direct quotations [and thus plagiarizing by proxy].
THAT is the real problem many college instructors face.
— TM · Mar 25, 12:32 AM · #
I find the thesaurus a useful jog to memory when I’m looking for something different. It would never occur to me to pick out a word I didn’t know already or whose appropriateness did not strike me as exact. That’s how the thesaurus was presented to me, back in 7th grade—sometime in the last century.
— TW · Mar 25, 08:23 AM · #
This issue is tied to contemporary aesthetics and issues of national identity.
“The american grain” of langauge has come to dominate not only how we ask poets and fiction writers to write but also how we ask our students to write. Plain-language backyard-philosopher poetry trumps the MFA programs; a kind of Chekhov-meets-Hemingway idea of the sentence dominates the reading lists. And we ask our students to write essays with simple language, obvious transitions, so that the words become transparent.
This was part of the thrill of Barthes and Derrida as writers: their ability to mix registers, from playful and poetic to scientistic.
This is also why experimental American writers are often criticized. They refuse to obey the “good ole anglo-saxon over latin” vocab rules, they refuse to suborn every piece of writing to one register, they refuse to write every poem as if it were spoken by a well-educated grandpa who, while reading Sophocles, also works on engines in his garage.
— Luther Blissett · Mar 25, 08:24 AM · #
Yes, 5, but even the casual television viewer must have noticed that Madison Avenue’s lingo is much more Derridean than ever before. And our students want those jobs and those salaries and they don’t seem to understand that they might also need to learn to speak the new age English language used in even the most popular culture of all: advertising.
I suggest the problem lies in their “whole language” experiences at the elementary and secondary levels. Which brings us back to the dictionary, etc., of course (4). And grammar and all….
As the HERI annual The American Freshman survey tells us each year, the K-12 chickens come home to roost in the classrooms of our colleges and universities. And as the Pew study on college literacy attests, they don’t seem to leave with skills much better than those with which they arrived.
Go figure….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Mar 25, 09:39 AM · #
Lest we forget: those K-12 teachers were hatched in colleges and universities, of course.
One of those little circular ironies of American educaiton….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Mar 25, 09:42 AM · #
Mark’s use of “‘mellifluous sonorities” must be in fashion because it shows up in James Wolcott’s contribution to Critical Mass, too: “Given the mellifluous, monotonous sonorities of William F. Buckley’s later years …” Maybe it’s time to look in the thesaurus again.
More to the point, students need to, as David Bartholomae suggests, “learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define that discourse of our community,” and sometimes this means that the clothes don’t fit very well. Looking up new words in the thesaurus isn’t quite the same as appropriating the words of our disciplines, but the impulse is similar: Both strategies require moving beyond a student’s normal way of speaking. Admittedly, some choices are often baggy and and poorly suited to the occasion, but those attempts are valuable, provided that we nurture the desire and guide the efforts. As with Mark, I’d prefer the mismatched outfit that may show a desire to play with language rather than a safe, correct, mundane contribution. Sure, it’s not an either/or situation, but if a student errs, I prefer she err on the side of experimentation, for the student just planted a seed I can water.
— blaga · Mar 25, 10:37 AM · #
AHA: Advertising language has always been innovative. See Johanna Drucker’s work on modernist typography and print advertising. And English majors have often filled copywriting positions.
I don’t understand your attack on whole language education, though, which emphasizes learning to read by reading (rather than vocalizing sounds). I think both phonics and whole language methods are essential to building literacy, but there’s nothing in whole language methods that would get in the way of vocabulary building.
— Luther Blissett · Mar 25, 11:10 AM · #
9, It is my understanding that the whole language movement in its “writing wing”, so to speak, has always emphasized self-expression as unassailable and essentially always worthy of acceptance, regardless of its form. So, it is not the vocabulary building but the “aesthetics and national identity” (from your excellent commentary above) which appears to be a by-product, albeit unwitting, of the whole language movement.
I am reminded of the news item last week concerning the school which has decided to use language analysis (grammar, etc.) instead of immersion for its ESL students — with dramatically better results in English literacy.
And, yes, of course, advertizing language has always been innovative (but not necessarily Derridaean!). I was simply seconding your point — from which you appear to be retreating, unfortunately.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Mar 25, 09:49 PM · #
At the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business my best MBA students were always undergrad philosophy and literature majors. This was NOT due to having large bulbous protrusive ebullient anorexic chthonian vocabularies!!!
It was because in teamwork situations they could so precisely listen to others and reflect verbally back what those others “intended” to say, that only they could meld disperate ideas and values into things everyone could support. The precision of their listening and representing of what others intended to say gave them great power to get things done in group settings.
CEOs add to this a felicity with treating emotions and drives in persons similarly—to be greatly listened to, discerned, and represented accurately to others.
Econ and business undergrad majors, were, to put it succinctly, losers—people so stupid they went to Business schools to learn about how to do Silicon Valley technology ventures (ALL the major top ten business schools added technology management, venturing, and entrepreneurship programs 15 years or more AFTER Silicon Valley zoomed to global prominence in those domains and therefore 15 years AFTER discerning people made money doing so. If you want to be consistently 15 years behind a way to make lots of money—go, by all means, to your nearest top ten MBA program!!!! Geez stupid is as stupid does.
The Thesaurass (emphasis on the lasst syllable) may be en route to such verbal discernment skill. If so, let’s continue to use and praise it. The key, however, is showing to the vast hordes of dummies doing undergrad econ and business majors that THEY THEREBY cripple their chance of EVER being effective in business (or anything else that involves more than a few pets as colleagues).
— Richard Tabor Greene · Mar 31, 09:22 AM · #
I don’t suppose anyone here uses the Thesaurus simply because it’s fun, huh?
— kgotthardt · Mar 31, 11:20 AM · #
“The next time you’re in the cafeteria with four friends and the colloquy turns to Obama, mutter this: “Such mellifluous sonorities the man produces.” See how they react.‘”
Those college kids will react, I hope, as I would react if one of my colleagues muttered those words at our own prandial colloquy: with laughter, recognizing that the mutterer had hilariously used big words in a small-word setting.
Yes, I help some kids strip their writing of inappropriate Latinisms but only after first helping them understand what “inappropriateness” entails.
I’ll trust David Crystal and the Graffs on this one—not Mark Bauerlein.
— PoliticsandtheEnglishLanguage · Apr 4, 07:58 AM · #
I am wearing an atheletic supporter. The thesaurus tells me that this is also called a jockstrap or a truss, perhaps.
— Tom B · Apr 4, 04:47 PM · #
disparate.
— A. Phil Undergrad & Law Doc · Apr 5, 06:22 PM · #
I started to read this assuming it was one of those pat-yourself-on-the-back pieces we all read from time to time when we feel like having some company while we shake our heads about the decline of standards in the world. Unfortunately I disagree with at least half of it. I certainly whince at the mumblings of today’s slack-jawed youth, but I disagree that we should pepper our conversations with silly latinate words just to sound posh. There are so many great words in English, the best of these the simple ones properly used, that there is no need (apart from a collective inferiority complex or a desire to hide wooly thinking behind pretend-scientific words) to go charging off into latin, greek and french all the time. If the two options available are speaking like a rapper or a government white paper, well then we are in dire straits indeed. The only reason to use a different word is to express a different thought, not hide the lack of original thinking with an expansive vocabulary. Children need to be encouraged to read more widely and think more critically. If they do that the need to pick up Roget’s to jog their memory will be a natural action and not the false posing of a blowhard. I’ll admit to stealing most of my beliefs on this subject from Orwell but there should be no shame in that.
— Scott A. · Apr 5, 08:57 PM · #